I
n the Seventies Apple issued the Blue and Red albums, which featured an actual discography of The Beatles including singles with the B sides (!) listed. Imagine. Anyway, one single in particular always caught my eye: “Ticket To Ride/Yes It Is.” (I don’t know who first came up with the idea of separating A and B sides by a forward slash, but we’re still doing it today.) You see, “Yes It Is” hadn’t appeared on any album yet, so it was a complete mystery to me. A Beatles song I hadn’t even heard of before? I won’t liken it to finding the lost Dead Sea scrolls, but it did make my world a little larger. When I heard “Yes It Is” for the first time, larger still. It’s a mopey, downbeat ballad wherein John laments a lost love and the guitars drift in and out like ghosts. It puts a lump in my throat every time. “Ticket To Ride” (aah, finally getting to the A side) is an early cousin to “Norwegian Wood,” experimenting with feedback while watching a relationship fall apart from a detached distance. Speculation on the song’s true meaning apparently runs rampant, so I’ll spare you from the sparring on Songfacts this time. Yes, The Carpenters did do a version of “Ticket To Ride.” And, yes, it did blow giant monkey chunks.